What is Required of a Microsoft Certified Partner?

The small business I work for is looking into options for obtaining MSDN licensing and I was wondering if anyone with personal experience could briefly summarize the steps and requirements in becoming and maintaining a Microsoft Certified Partner title.

I have looked over the requirements list and from what I can tell a qualified business is one which offers Microsoft solutions to other businesses and employs individuals who meet certain accreditation requirements as put forth by Microsoft (this is where I'm fuzzy on the specifics).

As a point of reference, the organization I represent constructs ASP.NET website solutions for small to medium sized businesses. I am the only person employed by our organization who currently holds a MCP certification (C# WinForms), but I am also the only person who actually does .NET development (the other employees are either in design or accounting). Our organization consists of about 6 people and it has been established for more than 3 years so unfortunately BizSpark is not a viable option.

You need 50 points in the Microsoft point system to become a Microsoft Certified Partner(requirements are actually very clearly laid out on MS site).
https://partner.microsoft.com/US/program/managemembership/partnerpoints You said you were looking to get licenses. You might want to look into Microsoft Action Pack. Once you are a registered member, you can subscribe to Action Pack which gives you internal use licenses of a variety of MS software. In the latest email I received from Microsoft, starting May 24th, MS is launching another flavor of Action Pack which is more geared towards businesses that develop applications on the MS platform - I think its called Action Pack Design and Development. You get a TechNet subscription, MSDN licenses, etc. etc.
Check out:
https://partner.microsoft.com/40013779

You might qualify for empower, though I am not an expert on this topic

https://partner.microsoft.com/global/40012683